From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Materials move much more easily than knowledge. But when people mistakenly believe that the material is the binding constraint, they tend to come up with these bone-headed development strategies. Silicon Valley didn't specialize in silicon transistors because there was a lot of sand nearby.
We could partly predict where people will come from for future events.
I wasn't thinking about success or being 'big' or creating a huge business. I was thinking about answering a need, a void, creating something that wasn't there before.
Suddenly, your intuition about what to build is much more likely to be right because you're building what's missing in the future. You're tinkering with technologies first hand, understanding what's new about them firsthand, and understanding what's missing to fulfill and actualize their full potential firsthand.
The single best way to have a great idea is to produce lots of ideas. The number of new ideas your organization can produce is a metric for its ability to generate novel solutions to any given problem. Your ideaflow is the most crucial business metric that you've never considered.
There are no people called entrepreneurs but people perform entrepreneurial functions at different times. Edison performed great entrepreneurial acts. But he was also fierce opponent of innovation when it threatened his business interests.
What's the business hip hop of this post pandemic world? Who's going to be the Rapper's Delight of the post pandemic world?
While many were focused on selling routers and switches, I envisioned a more transformative goal: changing the way the world works, learns, lives, and plays via the internet... we must sell outcomes, driven by technology, rather than just selling products.
It's quite rare to enhance the product experience and simultaneously challenge an existing business model. Typically, you manage to achieve either one or the other. However, Perplexity introduces a superior product experience by saving users time and eliminating the need for them to click through links. This disruption is nothing short of revolutionary.
We don't need bigger or smaller government; we need better government. A leaner, more agile, more innovative government can solve problems faster, without necessitating more money being spent or the overall size of government increasing. This isn't a left or right issue; I think we can all agree on the fact that we want efficient government.
The way an orchestra is normally structured is cast in the image of what people in the 18th century thought society should look like. It's very top-down, a hierarchical power structure… I wanted to subvert that by creating a new orchestral structure that reflected how society could be.
The Internet is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies, it's becoming our typewriter and our printing press, our map and our clock, our calculator and our telephone, our post office and our library, our radio and our TV.